Think about it: Arsenal lost their most important defender and their first choice keeper and went on to keep a clean sheet after. Not bad.

I didn’t give Djourou any credit yesterday, it was hard to give credit to him because Senna and Adebayor overshadowed everything else. But to come on, in a Champions League quarter final, under fire, hostile territory, down 1-0, and to just put in a solid performance would normally deserve at least a mention. Same for Fabianski, all he did was come on for an injured keeper, without warm-up, down 1-0, and promptly make two key saves. No wonder then that he thinks he should be a first choice keeper.

You’ll forgive me I’m sure, my oversight, especially now that they have been duly recognized for their contributions. Maybe Arsenal are warriors?

Cesc too, deserves some credit. He’s out there, playing in a CL 1/4 final, not 100% fit. It certainly shows the requisite desire for him to be out there, even if it does leave us vulnerable to the types of goals Senna scored.

The answer there is for the team to take a good look at the tapes and say “ok, the Captain needs our help, and we need his brilliance, we all need to step up.” Certainly Titus Bramble and Lee Cattermole aren’t going to take it easy on Cesc this weekend. They’ll be looking to exploit just this kind of weakness. So, while I don’t count the Wigan game as that important in the race for 4th place, I do see it as important for solving some of the tactical weaknesses that Chelsea and Villareal will try to exploit over the next two weeks.

Throw in that Gallas is out for the rest of the season, England’s Future Number One is out for 3 weeks with an ankle injury and now it’s being revealed that Clichy picked up a back injury and more than ever the team will need to circle the wagons and plump up our team work. Will Kieran Gibbs feature against Chelsea and Villareal or will Wenger put in Silvestre? Tough choice there and I suspect we’ll get a preview into Wenger’s thinking against Wigan.

Wigan Wigan Wigan… Maybe Wigan will be important after all. It’s an away game, against a tough team that can’t be taken lightly. It’s a real shame that we can’t catch the game live here in the States: FSC has the rights to the game and have decided to replay it… at Midnight Eastern Time. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why: it’s not a retardedly early kickoff and there aren’t other, better, games on at 7am. I mean, come on, Chelsea v. Bolton over Wigan v. Arsenal?

Sigh

Honestly, I think us American Gooners are just a bit spoiled by the veritable cornucopia of games we get to watch. Just a bit. We have so many options as Gooners that when one or two weekends a year aren’t broadcast we get a bit… uppity.

Imagine if you were a Spuds fan? Ok, besides spending a lifetime commemorating that one win over Arsenal, the only time you’d ever get to watch your team live would be when they play Arsenal.

That would suck.

So, Arsenal face Wigan on Saturday at 9pm local time (tape delay) and I guess I’ll have to do something else with my Saturday until I can watch the match. It’s supposed to be nice, I think I’ll mow the lawn and get a jump on the garden.

Now see if you were a ManU or Pool fan you could watch every single game every weekend on 5 different channels. That’s what gets me about the American feeds – it’s always ManU and Liverpool, but I suppose they arguably have the larger followings. However it’s not just games but commentary. I was watching FSR and while I love Bobby McMahon, he did a good 20 minute analysis of the Manc/Porto game and then maybe 7-8 mins. on Arsenal/Villareal. This is the kind of respect (or lack thereof) we get as Arsenal fans in the western hemisphere. We’re a much bigger club than Chelsea but they will get more coverage because they have more money or just afford more expensive players. We’re historically the third best big four English club with 13 league titles, only behind Liverpool’s 18 and ManU’s 17 so why does the media think we don’t deserve better publicity?

To be fair, Arsenal has not done a good job of marketing itself in the West like other European teams. With Gadizis and Kroenke on the team I think we will see a vast improvement in that respect.

Arsenal is just now starting Youth training camps in the US and affiliating themselves with MLS clubs, etc. Manu, Real Madrid, Barcelona, AC Milan, and to a lesser extent Juve and Inter have all been hitting the Western market for many years. I only got into Arsenal after seeing them play a game against Chelsea some years back and was instantly hooked by their style of play.

I use an old Pentium 4 laptop with 20 GB HD for my streaming and downloading. Ratcheted up with 4 GB RAM, free Mozilla Firefox browser, XP, Free AVG and Ad-Aware for virus and spyware protection. Ramp up the Virtual Memory on the HD, add free Windows Media Player with all the Codecs downloaded from the internet, and back up the system on an external HD.

All other software is removed to keep a clean system. No multiple players, no Microsoft Office suite, etc. It works like a charm and you will never have to worry about messing up your Email and the other good stuff. An old desktop can be used also but the laptop is just more portable.

Total cost $250.00

If you want to get fancy like I do, add an external high end Video card so you can stream in HD audio and video through your big screen TV or home theater system.